Grand design
Samuel de Champlain dreamed of a more tolerant society in the New World, writes David Hackett Fischer
Champlain's Dream: The European Founding of North America
By David Hackett Fischer
Simon & Schuster, 834 pp.,illustrated, $40
In the aftermath of the 400th anniversary last year of the founding of Jamestown, Va., few in the United States have noticed that 2008 marks the quadricentennial of another historically significant North American settlement - Quebec, New France. Historian David Hackett Fischer marks the event with a study of "the father of New France," Samuel de Champlain. "Champlain's Dream" is a comprehensive, exhaustively researched, yet always lively biography. Besides narrating a life it also, as its title suggests, tells the story of Champlain's vision for North America, which, Fischer maintains, was one of tolerance and humanity and remains worthy of admiration today.
Champlain was born, Fischer estimates, about 1570 in Brouage on the Bay of Biscay, in the mixed Protestant-Catholic region of Saintoge. His father rose from small fisherman to prosperous merchant, and he and Samuel developed close ties to the future King Henri IV. When Spanish and other Catholic forces invaded France in 1594 to help Catholic extremists overthrow Henri, Champlain supported the king, rising through the ranks to become a commanding officer. By war's end in 1598, Fischer surmises, Champlain had followed Henri in converting from Protestantism to Catholicism while retaining his commitment to religious toleration.
With France and Spain at peace, Champlain maneuvered in 1599 to accompany the Spanish fleet to America. Both he and Henri IV envisioned an imperial future for France, but few in France had witnessed the Spanish example. Fischer emphasizes the importance of the voyage in alienating Champlain from Spain's dehumanizing treatment of indigenous peoples and sharpening an alternative vision of European-Indian cooperation. Champlain prepared a report for the king, who was pleased enough that he awarded Champlain an annual pension.
In 1603 Champlain made his first trip to Canada on orders from the crown, exploring the lower St. Lawrence River area, and in the following year embarked for three years in Acadia (now Nova Scotia), exploring possible sites for colonies there and along the coast southward as far as Cape Cod. As he traveled, he made maps and recorded his experiences, including environmental details and the expeditions' varying successes in dealing with natives. Henri's regard for Champlain's abilities and advice became clear when he put the explorer in charge of establishing a permanent outpost on the St. Lawrence in 1608.
Fischer shows how, following Henri's assassination in 1610, Champlain divided his time between the colony and his home country. In Canada, Champlain oversaw an expanding network of alliances with Native Americans, established New France on a sound military and political footing, and presided over a settler population that finally began to grow after 1630. In France he sought to enhance his standing at court by arranging to marry the 12-year-old daughter of a royal official. Although the agreement included a proviso that the marriage remain unconsummated for two years, Hélène Boullé de Champlain would never reconcile herself to the union. Fischer does not make clear whether the marriage actually helped Champlain at court, where he maneuvered to defend New France against commercial rivals and those who considered it a mere distraction. Despite such obstacles, the colony's future was assured by the time Champlain died, in 1635.
Fischer leaves little doubt that as soldier, sailor, navigator, cartographer, cross-cultural diplomat, colonial advocate, and political leader Champlain was a formidable figure. The author is less persuasive in his insistence on the primacy of Champlain's humanism as a historical force. To be sure, Champlain did not endorse restrictions imposed on Protestant worship in the 1620s in New France. Yet those and subsequent limits on religious and intellectual freedom prevented the Enlightenment, unlike in Britain's American colonies, from penetrating New France. However noble Champlain's sentiments, they were of little lasting consequence.
Without doubt, as Fischer proclaims, Champlain's dealings with Indians distinguished him from "the conquistadors of New Spain" who made Native Americans "into a force of servile workers" and from "the founders of New England" who sought "to keep the Indians at a distance or drive them from their own lands." But Fischer ignores the irrelevance of Spanish and English colonial models in lightly populated Canada, where the French depended on the cooperation of far-flung Native Americans in supplying them with beaver pelts. It would be more plausible to suggest that Champlain's hard-headed pragmatism rather than his idealism facilitated New France's solid start.
For their part, Native Americans responded in kind, that is, less to Champlain's humanity than to what he offered in return. Fischer largely overlooks scholarly findings on the histories and motives that Montagnais, Huron, Iroquois, and other Indians brought to their interactions with Champlain and with one another. For example, no evidence supports his assertion of Montagnais-Iroquois warfare "long before the Europeans arrived." Instead their rivalry appears to have been rooted in competition over access to French traders on the St. Lawrence during the 1580s. Nor does Fischer consider the likelihood that French trade ties and heavy population losses from epidemics, almost certainly introduced (albeit inadvertently) by the traders, were at least as important as Champlain's humanity in prompting the Montagnais to ally with the explorer against the Iroquois in 1603.
Fischer's assessment of Champlain's long-range influence on French-Indian relations is similarly narrow. He neglects to note that Champlain's decision to attack the Iroquois in 1609 inaugurated a pattern of deadly warfare that would help to limit sharply New France's growth and prosperity for the rest of the 17th century. Moreover, by the time Champlain died, the Montagnais were a depopulated and weakened people of less interest to New France than the more westerly Huron.
To be sure, "the father of New France" had a vision for Native Americans that left its mark. Fischer makes clear that Champlain admired Indians' physical capacities, considered them potential intellectual equals of the French, and found many individual Indians more convivial than most French commoners. But as Fischer also notes, he regarded their lack of Christianity, of hierarchical social and political structures, and of systems of universal law as flaws that they must overcome. Fischer misses the point that while less harsh than his Spanish and English counterparts, Champlain shared their insistence that Native Americans subordinate themselves to European Christian authority. Whether considering Champlain's time or our own, we should be wary of idealists who would impose their visions on others.
Neal Salisbury is professor emeritus of history at Smith College. 